The ConTeXt suite is a complete, up-to-date ConTeXt distribution that can be upgraded efficiently. It can also be used in parallel with existing TeX installations such as MikTeX, TeXLive, and so forth. The suite does not include LaTeX packages and binaries.

Sometimes ConTeXt beta releases have issues. The ConTeXt suite allows you to test the latest ConTeXt release without worrying whether upgrading will corrupt a critical project. Multiple ConTeXt suite installations are possible. This allows, for example, a stable version and a beta version to run in parallel on the same computer.

ConTeXt is also included in TeXlive. The ConTeXt suite is updated continuously, whereas ConTeXt in TeXlive is updated less often. In particular, luatex and metapost are under active development and their binaries are updated frequently. ConTeXt follows these developments, indeed often drives development. As the binaries included in the TeXlive distribution are only updated yearly, ConTeXt on TeXlive will necessarily be less current than the ConTeXt suite. (ConTeXt on TeXlive can be kept somewhat more current using the http://tlcontrib.metatex.org repository.) The ConTeXt suite is self-contained and can happily coexist alongside another installed TeX distribution.

Dependencies

The following programs are not required for running ConTeXt, but their installation adds additional functionality.

curl : for including remote content

ghostscript : for converting PostScript images to PDF

graphicsmagick (convert) : for converting GIF and TIFF images

inkscape : for converting SVG and compressed SVG

mupdf (mudraw) : for converting PDF to PNG (used for ePub covers)

pstoedit : for converting PostScript to MetaPost outlines

zint : for providing barcodes

zip or 7zip : for EPUB generation

Disc space required

ConTeXt macro files are small (less than 10MB), but the suite comes with various free fonts which considerably increase the size of the distribution to around 200MB).

Multiple instances of the installation

Please note from the start that we recommend installing a complete ConTeXt installation for each project in a production environment. The installation tree is portable (see Moving the Installation Around, below) and can be located under the project's own directory. The advantage is to allow each project to use an instance of ConTeXt that is adapted to its coding and that only gets updated purposely. Since the ConTeXt Standalone is "bleading edge" and subject to developement, certain details in commands, syntax or rendering may evolve slightly. Having a vintage ConTeXt tree for each production project insures that one can come back years later and produce identical results.

So as not to get carried away under this approach, one can eventually group projects by vintage, period or season, according to cycles of productivity.

Unix-like platforms (Linux/MacOS X/FreeBSD/Solaris)

Single user installation

Select a folder where you want to install ConTeXt. We recommend that you can use your $HOME/context directory. Create this folder. Then download and place it in $HOME/context directory. Open a terminal, then:

System-wide installation

A system wide installation is recommended for users who are comfortable with the command line. Only the location of installing ConTeXt is different for a system wide installation.

on Linux you can use /opt/context

on MacOS X you can use /Applications/ConTeXt

Note that, at present, while using MkIV, you need to have write permissions for the $TEXMFCACHE directory. This effectively means that only one user will be able to generate the formats unless you set the group permissions appropriately. For example:

Apache webserver installation

Another common usecase is invoking ConTeXt from within a web application. Because web directories are often self-contained, and in the case of Apache under Ubuntu, ownership of the directory and its contents are assigned to a user and group without a login shell, e.g., www-data:www-data this prevents a web application from invoking a ConTeXt installation done using either the single-user or system-wide method listed above.

In this case the solution is to install ConTeXt within the website tree, and ideally in the public sub-tree. The public sub-tree is commonly the home directory for the application and relative pathnames are resolved as if immediately below it.

For example, in the case of the PHP web framework Laravel, ConTeXt can be installed alongside other assets in the <path-to-document-root>/public/context directory:

Now as part of your application's invocation of ConTeXt, you will need to set up the shell environment. This is easily done by creating a simple BASH shell script, also to be installed in the public part of the document tree:

And the output will once again be found in <path-to-document-root>/tex/spool.

Arch Linux

There’s a PKGBUILD in
the AUR, provided by Aditya [1].
Install it using your favorite AUR frontend, e.g.

yaourt -S context-minimals-git

This will get you a fresh, up-to-date Context tree in
/opt/context-minimals.

The funtoo way

If you are using funtoo there are ebuilds that will make an installation as easy as installing any other package from portage. Take a look at the ConTeXt Standalone Funtoo Howto. This might also work for gentoo, but is untested right now.

Proxy settings

The installation script uses rsync to fetch the required files. So, if you are behind a proxy server, you need to tell the details to rsync. The easiest way to set this is to set RSYNC_PROXY variable in the terminal or your startup script (.bashrc or the corresponding file for your shell). Replace username, password, proxyhost and proxyport with the correct information

export RSYNC_PROXY=username:password@proxyhost:proxyport

Sometimes, when behind a firewall, port 873 may be closed for outgoing TCP connections. If port 22 is open for ssh connections, a trick that can be used is to connect to a computer located somewhere outside of the firewall and to tunnel port 873 (using the program nc).

export RSYNC_CONNECT_PROG='ssh tunnelhost nc %H 873'

where tunnelhost is the machine outside of the firewall on which you have ssh access. Of course, this machine must have nc and port 873 open for outgoing TCP connections.

Usage

ConTeXt suite works in a non-interfering manner because it does not put anything in your $PATH and does not set any system variables. This in turn means that in order to use it, you need to do some initialization. An intialization script called setuptex is provided in installation-dir/tex/.

Terminal/Command line

To run context from a terminal, source setuptex:

source /installation-dir/tex/setuptex

Exclusive usage

If you always use ConTeXt suite and never use LaTeX or plain TeX provided by another TeX distribution, you can add the following line to the startup script of your shell (For bash, the startup script is $HOME/.bashrc; for zsh it is HOME/.zshrc).

source /installation-dir/tex/setuptex

Then setuptex will always be sourced in your terminal.

Integrating with an editor

The easiest way to run ConTeXt from an editor is to open a terminal, source setuptex in the terminal, and then open your editor from the same terminal.

Another option is to add /installation-dir/tex/texmf-<platform>/bin to the $PATH that the editor searches. The details vary depending on the editor. See Text Editors for instructions on integrating ConTeXt with various editors.

Uninstalling

ConTeXt suite does not touch anything outside its installation folder. So to uninstall it, you can simply remove the installation folder.

Remaking formats

Normally, the update script should create the formats for you. If for some reason you need to recreate the formats, you can do the following:

For making MKII format.

mktexlsr
texexec --make --all

For making XeTeX format

mktexlsr
texexec --make --xtx --all

For making MKIV format

mtxrun --generate
context --make

Windows

If you want to use ConTeXt suite alongside MikTeX/TeXLive (needed if you also run LaTeX), follow the command-line installation method.

Installation

Command line method

Download context-setup-mswin.zip or context-setup-win64.zip, and unzip to a directory where you want to install ConTeXt. It is recommended that you choose a directory that does not have a space in its full path. Then open cmd.exe, go to the installation directory and run

first-setup.bat

This takes a long time, so go have a coffee.

By default, the suite installs ConTeXt beta. If you want the stable version of ConTeXt, you can use

first-setup.bat --context=current

By default, the suite does not install modules and other third party content. If you want the modules (and have the bandwidth), you can use

Proxy settings

The installation script uses rsync to fetch the required files. So, if you are behind a proxy server, you need to tell the details to rsync. The easiest way to set this is to set RSYNC_PROXY variable in the terminal as (replace username, password, proxyhost and proxyport with the correct information)

set RSYNC_PROXY=username:password@proxyhost:proxyport

or set the variable permanently as a Windows environment variable.

Sometimes, when behind a firewall, port 873 may be closed for outgoing TCP connections. If port 22 is open for ssh connections, a trick that can be used is to connect to a computer located somewhere outside of the firewall and to tunnel port 873 (using the program nc).

export RSYNC_CONNECT_PROG='ssh tunnelhost nc %H 873'

where tunnelhost is the machine outside of the firewall on which you have ssh access. Of course, this machine must have nc and port 873 open for outgoing TCP connections.

Usage

Before running ConTeXt, you need to run setuptex.bat which is provided in installation-dir\tex\. This can be done by typing

installation-dir\tex\setuptex.bat

on cmd.exe before you run ConTeXt. To avoid always having to type this, you can create a shortcut to cmd.exe and edit the command line to read (assuming you installed the suite in C:\Programs; otherwise replace C:\Programs\ with your installation directory)

C:\WINDOWS\System32\cmd.exe /k C:\Programs\context\tex\setuptex.bat

This starts up a new command shell with the environment pre-loaded. Within the new shell you can just type context to run ConTeXt. E.g.

C:\> context --version

to check that you are running the version you think you're running.

Use ConTeXt with Cygwin

After installing the ConTeXt suite, you can run it under Cygwin. With Cygwin, you may use gmake and other Unix tools for your automated workflow.

Under Cygwin prompt, run context.cmd test.tex . Note that the .cmd extension is needed under Cygwin.

Updating

If you used the command line method, just run first-setup.bat again to update the suite.

Uninstallation

If you used the command-line installer, you can just delete the installation directory to uninstall the suite.

Troubleshooting

rsync sometimes has problems with paths with uppercase letters (like c:\Temp or C:\Documents and Settings). Installing into all-lowercase paths without spaces sometimes helps.

Directory-name length may also have an effect, due to Windows's 8.3 filename conventions. An indicator is if running "texexec --lua" on a file produces missing-file warnings containing Windows-created 8-character directory names, such as "C:\CONTEX~1\tex", where your ConTeXt directory is really "C:\context_minimals\tex". Be conservative and choose a short name like "C:\ctm\tex". Also, this may even work when an 8-character-or-less directory name like "C:\ctexmin\tex" doesn't.

If you're behind firewall and rsync times out, you need to open port 873 for outgoing TCP connections.

If you update luaTeX occasionally you may get something like

engine mismatch (luv: This is LuaTeX, Version beta-<version>-<date1> (TeX Live 2013/dev)(rev <number1>) <> bin: This is LuaTeX, Version beta-<version>-<date1> (TeX Live 2012/W32TeX)(rev <number2>)), forcing remake

In which case your format will be remade every time you compile a file. In /texmf-mswin make sure that luatex.exe and texlua.exe have the same date; then also delete luatex.dll. This usually solves the problem.

Installing third party modules

The ConTeXt suite only comes with Taco's t-bib module. If you want to install a new module, say Wolfgang's t-letter module, you can use

first-setup.sh --modules="t-letter"

If you want to install more than one extra module, you can separate them by commas. So, to install the t-letter and t-mathsets module, do

sh ./first-setup.sh --modules="t-letter,t-mathsets"

If you want to install all extra modules at once, do

sh ./first-setup.sh --modules=all

Reverting to an older installation

If, for some reason, you want to revert to an older installation, you can do that by

sh ./first-setup.sh --context=date

where date is the date of one of the stable releases of ConTeXt. The complete list of old releases that are available is here.